Quarrel with the King by Adam Nicolson Page A

pastoral, for the Arcadian vision, was most central to English culture. Was pastoralism—like the modern environmental movement—the expression of a world realizing that something real and valuable, which previously had been taken for granted, was now under threat and disappearing from under its nose? If imagination is the cousin of memory, then are the dream worlds of Renaissance England in fact the reassembled fragments of a remembered existence that people’s fathers and grandfathers might have considered normal?
    The copyhold system was, of course, both good and bad. The tenancy was usually given for three lives, sometimes to a man, his wife, and a son; a man, his sister, and her husband; a man and two sons; or a widow and her son and daughter. It gave security to the farmers and allowed them to invest in improvements that a short lease could not allow. Land and buildings were only rarely let to single individuals; the lease for three lives, if to a man, his wife, his sons, meant that the terms of the lease would extend to whichever of these was the last to die. No one, in other words, would be ejected from their house and farm on the death of a husband or a father. Leases for three lives meant that the maintenance of the social fabric was built into the economic structure of the place.
    But the system’s conservatism was also a brake. The entire system was presided over by the memory of how things had always been done. Wisdom was essentially proverbial: what was known was good; what was strange was bad. Anything inherited was to be held on to; anything innovatory to be looked at with suspicion. The real story of this ancient form of life was not freedom but imposition, the restrictions on the individual that the workings of the community required. No modern surveillance society could match the reality of a chalkland village in which work patterns, sexual habits, the ability to sell and trade, and forms of inheritance and friendship were all closely supervised, not by the distant lord of the manor but by the other villagers themselves. The all-seeing eyes of neighbors deeply familiar with “the custom of the manor,” that inherited habit, monitored every inch and second.
    Whether and where you could collect sticks for firewood, the thickness of the hedge around your garden, the suitability of your chimney for fires, the state of your roof, the dirtiness of the path up to your door, the ringlessness of your pigs’ noses, the size of your back room, the clothes your wore, the way you spoke in public, the amount you could drink, your behavior in church: on every conceivable issue, thevillage could police the habits and trangressions of its inhabitants, and having “presented” the offenders, could sentence and punish them. Village stocks and ducking stools were both the symbols and instruments of control. Right up until the seventeenth century, villagers guilty of theft or adultery were beaten in English villages “until their backs were bloody.” Wilton had its own “cage, pillory and stocks.” The tumbrel and “cucckingstool” (“a chair in which scolds were sat down to be dunked [ demergebantur ] in the river”) were kept in the little “parrock” (an enclosure fenced in with hurdles) belonging to a townsman called Richard Hatchett.
    The village was never more vigilant than on the question of land—its boundaries, uses, and access. Common land was not common to anyone: it was common to the few villagers who had rights over it. Others were excluded. The great open fields were not open in any democratic sense: their individual strips, even if reallocated each year among the villagers, were individually named and individually owned, marked, and policed. You could be had up for trespassing on them just as much as on any enclosed land. Acres of parchment were devoted to precise and enforceable rights to and exclusions from wood, marsh, and